I haven’t mentioned this yet, but in Eco you have 30 days before a meteor crashes into your planet. Shifting to a new currency is complicated, and it’s not like we have time to figure this out with long, drawn-out processes. It's a total capitalism/communism argument.
We're 2 days into our 13-player civilization in Eco (Minecraft with way more systems), and we are already at each other's throats about whether we should have stores or just help people with our specialization items as they need it. So I don’t have some secret motivation here to come out ahead of everyone - and that’s the entire point. And if we did the currency exchange, I would theoretically get the most because I have an infinite number of Grubbucks. Now, if you’ve followed my Eco diary on Twitter, you will know that I drove us to this point and played the role of the evil capitalist. The Grubbuck in no way reflects a players’ wealth, their purchasing power, and especially their contribution to our society so far. One person sold me their sawmill scraps that I used to make a basic building item (I don’t think they ever purchased anything in my store), a couple of others did some contracts for me to get stone out of the mine, and a handful of others just happened to have resources nearby that I was buying that they didn’t need.
#ECO THE GAME CURRENCY FULL#
Because I was the person running the store, I have the full picture of how people acquired my currency. This is a terrible idea, and we argued about it to the point of a stalemate this week. It is now time to shift to the new currency and people are assuming we need to do an exchange where you trade in your old store credits for the new universal Haypennies currency. I didn’t say anything out loud because even if people weren’t buying anything from me, it was still valuable to me that they were selling resources for what I knew was a worthless currency. I could see that store was immediately outperforming mine. It turns out that people only needed a couple dozen bricks for certain projects that we worked on together as a society.Īnother store did pop up, and this one was selling food for Zackbucks. But the problem is that while people were earning Grubbucks, they didn’t spend many of them. So my store is buying things like stone and sand for Grubbucks, and I’m selling bricks and a few odds-and-ends. I assumed that people would value the tier-2 building item bricks much more than they did. I made a miscalculation early in the game. We’re still relatively early on, so as long as we practice a sliver of moderation, we can’t do too much permanent damage. These systems are interdependent, so if you cut down a forest, you’re going to damage some animals that rely on the trees for food. Developer Strange Loop Games created it partially as an educational experience about the effects humans have on the planet, so Eco models pollution, wildlife populations (our hunting has almost driven multiple species to extinction), and plant populations. And I’ve decided to destroy my currency’s value in response.įor anyone looking for a shortcut explanation of Eco, it’s Minecraft with a lot more systems. Maybe that will still happen, but for now, my capitalist dream has led to bickering, greed, and a financial crisis. The profit motive, you see, would encourage people to work toward larger goals instead of their personal projects. I was of the opinion that we needed capitalism.
#ECO THE GAME CURRENCY SIMULATOR#
In the last week of my life in the survivalist civilization simulator Eco (which is out now in Early Access on Steam for $30), I attempted to destroy the friendly bartering/communist ecosystem that was keeping me and a dozen other players fed and advancing through the sim’s various skilltrees. GamesBeat Summit 2022 returns with its largest event for leaders in gaming on April 26-28th.